the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severely infringes personal liberties, but eventually makes whole economies less competitive as the hardest working & most ambitious workers migrate away.
the better approach is to try to ensure everyone has dignity and fair pay for the amount of work that they do. that's a function of the distribution of pay and wealth, which is something we can legislate via sticks and carrots.
Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given.
The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules.
Otherwise
- Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple.
- Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple.
- Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple
- Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay.
Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not.
Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them.
Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs.
Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.
The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life.
People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.
Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
Among the reasons for emigration to the US, there's not a single living soul that says "oh, I'm not legally allowed to work enough in my area of employment to achieve my dreams". It's a laughable and ridiculous statement.
you see: some people push very hard because their life is their work. They don’t have time for something else because they work a lot, and they work a lot effectively consuming what should be their free time because they don’t have the mental energy to so something else.
Once you create a bit of space and disentangle yourself from your work not a lot of people want to work extra time. ideally life should be split between work and creative pursuits and the percentage of work should decrease until it eventually hits 0. People will still do stuff, but your livelihood should not be tied to your job. You should pursue your “hobbies” because they are fun and/or fulfilling.
Automation is good enough today that we should not have to work more than 15-20 hours per week. Knowledge workers already do this but “butt in seat” mentality still says 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy really. We took all the productivity gains our technological advances brought and use them to create more bs work instead of reducing the amount of work we have to do.
That said, 100%, straight coding for 40 hours / week is probably unrealistic, but that's not really the full job description of a software developer.
To be clear, I am talking about a voluntary system. No one would be prevented from working more, it just wouldn't be necessary to survive. I love to work pretty much all the time, though only some of that is hours I am billing to my employer.
EDIT: I quickly rewrote my original comment after posting, but I do see one quoted reply got in before the change. Just wanted to add this note about the change.
What GP is arguing is that is achieved by fixing the pay distribution, not by limiting hours. If you only limit hours but don't fix the pay problem you create perverse incentives where people have to work undocumented "overtime" or face the threat that they will be replaced by someone who will or where people who want to work overtime face punitive punishments if they do so.
One thing I can be extremely clear on is that I do NOT think the US government legally limiting work hours is any kind of solution. I am all about looking at society as a whole and reasoning on society-wide changes we can make voluntarily to achieve a better world.
Unfortunately any kind of solution that tries to address the market side effects of labor will die in the US by the socialism boogeyman
Reminds me of Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch, which also ponders this question. I can't do it justice with just one excerpt, but here's one passage that always stays with me:
The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.
... Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.
Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.
The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).
And fun fact: retraining absolutely does not work. Less than 10% can be retrained and usually they are the segment that could have retrained themselves without specific retraining.
It is my view that it is perfectly feasible to design economies (in a voluntary way) where people can work 20 hours a week and have two months off a year every year. Or closer to our current world, there is no question in my mind that we could keep things as good or better they are now materially, while making sure no person has to work more than 40 hours a week to survive.
I do love to talk about specific strategies [1] but that quickly activates our tribal instincts and can cause violent arguments even when our underlying goals are in near complete agreement. So it can be useful to just ponder on the above. How did things get the way they became? Is it due to iron wrought natural laws, or historical decisions we could freely agree to change?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27860696